Page 33 of The Dungeon Book

The other servants lived in terror of Offa and Mistress Clove, though none of them contemplated murder with the same degree of intensity or intention as Bait – or Eel, as they called her, which was at least less of a mouthful than Ealdufrida. Their relationship with her went through three distinct stages in as many seasons.

The first of these phases was pity, and began on the day Bait arrived at the castle. Sir Rudyard made a rare appearance at the top of the kitchen stair, and all the servants respectfully paused in their work and pretended to listen – all except Mistress Clove, who continued to massacre onions without the slightest glimmer of a tear. (She always felt that discrimination had barred her from her true vocation as an executioner.) “This girl,” declared Rudyard, “is named Ealdufrida. She was stolen away by a wood-hag. The monster has been driven back into the Dungeon where it belongs, and will trouble us no more. Ealdufrida will work here until her family are found.” Bait was hiding behind Sir Rudyard’s cloak, so he produced her like a conjuring trick and pushed her a few steps down the stair. “Go on, child,” he ordered her. “Do as you are told.”

Bait froze at the sight of all those faces staring up at her. She had never seen so many humans assembled in one place before.

“I cannot tell if she’s frightened out of her wits, or just a half-wit by nature,” muttered Rudyard. “Come fetch her!”

Fortunately for Bait, Offa was at the back of the crowd, so it was two of the serving girls who sprang up and escorted Bait into the warm belly of the kitchen. The girls gathered around the poor orphan, cooing over her, stroking her hair and whispering that she was now safe and secure and protected from all the horrors of the Dungeon. Bait, who missed the horrors of the Dungeon desperately, endured the torment of this comfort by clutching her silver coin so tightly that it dug deep into her callused palm. It was a relief when Mistress Clove snarled at the servants to get back to work.

The pity of the other servants deepened in those first weeks. Bait, alas, understood very little of the surface world. For this deficiency I must take some responsibility – my curriculum was overly academic, when the child would have benefited from an intensive course explaining, say, the difference between carrots and parsnips, or even the difference between carrots and firewood. She had no sense of time, either – in the Dungeon, she slept when she was tired, ate when she was hungry, and if she did not like whatever lesson I was trying to impart, would slip away in search of amusement. In the kitchen, one slept when it was night, ate when everyone else in the castle had eaten, and if you did not like your assigned chore you swallowed your discomfort and got on with it, or you would face the vinegar-spittle wrath of Mistress Clove.

Mistress Clove had Offa punish Bait when she used a box of carrots as kindling for the cooking fire, when she climbed inside the oven on a cold night, when she talked to the steam from a kettle, believing it to be a wraith in distress, and – worst of all – when she tried to go exploring. It became a cruel game of wits between the two – or wit on Bait’s part, and dogged cruelty on his. He’d barricade one window, she’d wriggle out of another. She’d try sneaking out of one door, and she’d be waiting on the other side, spoon in hand. Once, she tried reasoning with him, saying she needed to go to Lastease to find Squire Atten, but Offa called her a liar and beat her harder.

Bait was a lightning rod, and so unwittingly spared the other servants by taking punishments that would have fallen on them. But she had no use for their pity. The cloying words and kindness of the other servants seemed feigned – if they were really on her side, why would they not join in her war on Offa?

“Offa’s cruel to all of you, too. And everyone knows a pack of hagworms can take down a troll.”

They looked back at her blankly as if that wasn’t a self-evident truth.

“You just need to be good, Eel,” ventured Ysilde. “Don’t make trouble. Didn’t your mother teach you to behave?”

“No.”

The one moment of joy – as bright as a shaft of sunlight through a high window on the upper levels – was when Neb visited.

Neb’s father Gyul was now the village reeve and tax collector. It was not a position that agreed with him. Gyul was of a shy and nervous disposition, and the prospect of going to his neighbours and demanding they hand over their share of the taxes was torment to him. Even worse was the nerve-wracking collection round visiting the outlying farms – a slow cart through the forest, every bump in the dirt track making the cart lurch, the coin bags jingle and Gyul’s bowels quiver. By the end of the first day, Gyul was reduced to moaning in the back of the cart amid sacks of grain and wheels of cheese, and young Neb was breveted to cart-driver and chief guard, the reins bunched in his little hands and the reeve’s cudgel balanced precariously across his knees.

When they passed through the barbican of the keep and Neb was relieved of both duties and cudgel, he went in search of his friend.

Neb was struck by how poorly Bait’s costume suited her. When he had first met her in the wood, she’d been dressed in rags and stolen adventuring gear and goblin motley, and that strangeness of garb had rhymed with the strangeness of her manner. Now she was dressed in a servant’s tunic, her face soot-stained from the cooking fire and hands scrubbed raw from the laundry tub, just like all the other scullions, but he knew her instantly by the way she prowled rather than walked.

They withdrew to Bait’s lair in the pantry. Their conversation was stilted at first.

“It must be nice to live in the kitchen,” said Neb, staring at the sausages and strings of onions hanging from the ceiling.

“I thought they were stalactites. Or spikers.”

“Spiders?”

“Spikers.”

“What’s a spiker?”

He might as well have asked what a raindrop was. “You know. Grey bugs. Sharp shells. They climb up the walls and hang from the ceilings, and if anything walks underneath ’em they drop and squick.”

Neb shuddered.

“You get an iron pot, and you wear it as a helmet and you trick ’em into dropping on you. Then you fill the pot with water, and boil ’em, and eat the insides.” She pulled a saucepan from a shelf and waved it under the sausages. None of them plummeted with homicidal intent, which disappointed her. “I was going to lure Offa in here, if they were spikers. Your father’s cudgel – can I borrow it?”

“Why?”

“To kill Offa.”

“You can’t kill Offa!” objected Neb.

“I can! He doesn’t regenerate like a troll, and he’s not armoured or magic or—”

“You shouldn’t kill Offa.”